Quotes on Photographer

My skin's not a normal sight. When a photographer says, 'I don't know what it is, but that's just not it...' I know. They like the different colours of my skin. They're not getting them with a particular outfit.

If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life. I mean people are going to say, You're crazy. Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.

I've worked with the Los Angeles Zoo for 45 years, and we have this magnificent photographer, Tad Motoyama. He takes these wonderful, wonderful animal pictures. All through the years he's given me copies of these pictures. Well, I have all these gorgeous ones, so I said, 'Tad, I want to do a book with your picture on one side.'

It's always seemed to me that photography tends to deal with facts whereas film tends to deal with fiction.

I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do - that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.

I wish that all of nature's magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.

A photographer must always work with the greatest respect for his subject and in terms of his own point of view.

As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

If I like many photographers, and I do, I account for this by noting a quality they share - animation. They may or may not make a living by photography, but they are alive by it.

All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty.

I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us.

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

A photograph is neither taken or seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.

Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should?

They ... asked me: 'How do you make your pictures?' I was puzzled ... I said, I don't know, it's not important.

Poetry is the essence of everything, and it’s through deep contact with reality and living fully that you reach poetry. Very often I see photographers cultivating the strangeness or awkwardness of a scene, thinking it is poetry. No. Poetry is two elements which are suddenly conflict — a spark between two elements. But it’s given very seldom, and you can’t look for it. It’s like if you look for inspiration. No, it just comes by enriching yourself and living.

Obviously I am a photographer and I believe in my medium: I do think that powerful photographs can force change. It doesn't take long to look and be engaged in a strong image whereas, with a story, you have to actually sit down and pause and be involved in it.

What I am interested in now is the landscape. Pictures without people. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually there are no people in my pictures. It is so emotional.

Use anger to emotionalize whatever thing you intend to do in life - being a painter, a poet or a photographer

If I didn't have my camera to remind me constantly, I am here to do this, I would eventually have slipped away, I think. I would have forgotten my reason to exist.

My way of photographing is my way of life. I photograph from my experience, my way of seeing things.